


And The Cry Goes Out

by ishie



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Gen, Mild Gore, Pre-Canon, hannibal_exchange
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-12
Updated: 2013-10-12
Packaged: 2017-12-29 03:52:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1000554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishie/pseuds/ishie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In her dreams—while she sleeps and while she is awake—his nails are long and yellow, his blood slippery on her teeth and tongue.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And The Cry Goes Out

**Author's Note:**

  * For [neomeruru](https://archiveofourown.org/users/neomeruru/gifts).



> Title from "Glory and Gore" by Lorde, and a few lines from the Melville translation of Ovid's _Metamorphoses_. I tried to bring Will in sooner but ... it turns out Bedelia was where the story was. Hope you enjoy, neomeruru! I had great fun with it. :D

_summer_

Gloved hands press clean white bandages to her forehead, to her neck and hands, to the gash that splits her upper arm. _I'm fine_ crowds into her chest and throat but what comes out is closer to a whimper. It's more painful than the wounds that will heal quickly, and those that will heal slowly. Over months and years, long after the visible scars are gone.  
   
Bedelia clears her throat and leans away from the medic. Her bones creak beneath her skin. None broken, no splintered ends to grind against each other, not like the shards of glass that fill her veins.  
   
"He was my patient," she says to the detective. There is a smear of dried toothpaste on the placket of his thin blue shirt. "I have been treating him for several months but he had reached an impasse he was unwilling to work beyond. With me, at any rate."  
   
"So he was giving you the boot?"  
   
"I was going to refer him to another doctor."  
   
"And that's when he ..."  
   
For one she would assume is inured to violence in all its forms, the man seems shaken. His skin is pale beneath a summer tan. When she speaks, he rubs his mouth and looks away instead of taking notes. His teeth are bright and blunt and thick veins shadow his hands.  
   
"That is when he attacked me, yes," she finishes for him.  
   
It's not entirely the truth. The day will not sit easily in her head. Does not move from one moment to the next in an orderly progression. Instead, it jumbles together, scenes leapfrogging one another as though they cannot make sense in sequence. They _will_ not.  
   
It's close enough, though. It's easier to say than it is to remember. Hot sour breath in her nose and mouth before he started to choke. The door opening and a crisp breeze lifting papers on her desk. Rain-scented wind through the curtains. Sharp tearing pains, teeth grinding. Her skull cracking against the table where she kept the shallow brass bowl that rang and clanged and spun.  
   
"She should be in hospital, Detective Montoya," Hannibal says from nearby. His voice stirs the glass in her veins, the sharp pieces scraping, burrowing. "Surely she can answer your questions once her wounds have been properly attended."  
   
"All right," the detective says, easily. He asks the medics which hospital they will transport her to, and Hannibal intervenes again.  
   
"Perhaps it would be better if I drove you, Dr. Du Maurier? I could take you in your own car, if you like. You may find some little comfort in the familiar." Such formality. For her benefit or theirs, she doesn't know. She should know, but everything is falling out of place and into that deep dark well where she cannot chase it.  
   
No one declines his offer, least of all Bedelia, with her hair in knots and blood drying beneath her nails.  
   
"It is no trouble, I assure you," he says, as though to forestall the doubts she has not yet begun to entertain. A smile smooths over his face like cream.  
   
 

   
 _autumn_  
   
"Well, I think it would be the best thing for everyone, that's all."  
   
"So you've said."  
   
Her mother huffs, a harsh exhale from a thousand miles away. Outside, a car rolls through the intersection. The windshield is visibly shuddering from a bassline—or a disintegrating muffler—that is barely audible by the time it reaches her ears.  
   
"Are you sure you won't come home?" There's a thin grey thread of exasperation in her mother's voice. She worries, as she always does, over everything and nothing. She doesn't know that Bedelia has gone no further than the front porch in weeks. Has seen no one. That the food she eats is delivered in brown boxes from delivery trucks that rumble off down the street again before the bell stops ringing.  
   
"Maybe next month, when the weather is better." There's no promise in it. The weather will be better, but Bedelia will not, and she will dangle another unpromise in the air then, and again, and again. Someday, maybe, but not soon.  
   
There are more boxes in what used to be her office: plain brown cardboard and hard grey plastic. Bedelia hasn't set foot in there either. Someone came and washed the bloodstains out of the carpet, and righted the chairs from where they sprawled. The doors were open when she came home from the hospital that morning, and she saw, and she does not need to see again.  
   
"I beg to differ," Hannibal says, scraping against the glass that she's gathered around herself. The skin around his eyes tightens when he manages to get a nail wedged in between two razor-edged pieces.  
   
Bedelia wishes he would crack her open so she can see what will come spilling out, black and stinking.  
   
He is still there when she wakes from a midday nap that has stretched long into the evening. His fingers are bright with blood and the scars on her ribs pulse in time with his breath.  
   
His smile is sharp and white in the gloom. "She is only trying to help. She doesn't know any better."  
   
"But you do."  
   
"Of course. And you as well. We are birds of a feather, Bedelia." She'll be left with dark flecks of dried blood when he goes, bruises under her skin, and those shadows in her memories. The door, the wind, those teeth...  
   
After a moment, he asks, "What is there to fear outside?"  
   
"Nothing that I don't fear in here."  
   
"Then what is the purpose in hiding?"  
   
She could answer, but why? She knows what she would say, and so does he.  
   
 

   
 _winter_   
   
"You've read Ovid, of course. Cyane mourned so deeply, so sorrowfully, that she turned to water. 'In endless tears she wasted away. Into the pool—her pool and she but now its deity...' Her flesh melted and ran until she became the spring that marked the place where Persephone fell."  
   
Bedelia saw not the cool waters of legend but flesh bubbling and streaming into a great flame. "You think I follow the same path."  
   
"Do you?" A slight smile quirks Hannibal's wide mouth upward when she laughs.  
   
"How very pedestrian, Hannibal. Don't tell me you've lost your touch."  
   
"That is for my patients to decide, is it not?"  
   
"Or your friends, were they the observant type."  
   
"You are observant."  
   
She takes the compliment and does not argue the unspoken sentiment, false though it is. For all his skill and training, he cannot see any farther than the surface she presents. No more than she can see of him. _Birds of a feather._ Perhaps they could be friends, after a fashion.  
   
It's pleasant to have him here with her. Late afternoon sun trickles in the tall windows and puddles redly on the hardwood floor. A bottle of wine breathes on the counter; another waits to refill their glasses. At the stove, Hannibal adds the finishing touches to their meal: lamb with a chilled sweet pea and mint mousse. It's one of her favorites, and the whole reason for his visit, he had said when he arrived. Unexpected, in the middle of the day, two carrier bags hanging from his hands and the last snow of the year melting on his neatly combed hair.  
   
It's a far cry from the last time he was with her, when he escorted her to the hospital with blood drying and flaking under her nails. Bedelia has been with _him_ often since then, of course. Something in the easy way he leans back in the low-slung chair when they sit down for dinner makes her think he knows it.  
   
"Will you resume your practice, then?"  
   
The thrill of horror that runs through her escapes neither of their notice. "I think not," she says, carefully. "I may return to teaching." She taught him, once. They were of like ages and interests; she thought for a time they might be more. But there is a stillness under Hannibal's skin that she has never managed to ruffle, no matter how he pretends.  
   
"You do credit to the profession." He brushes his mouth with his napkin and settles it again on his lap below the table. "How are you sleeping?"  
   
"Well, and often."  
   
"Forgive the bluntness, Bedelia, but my curiosity compels me: have you engaged a therapist to help you work through your trauma?"  
   
The lamb is not as tender as she would have expected. She wishes he had left it bloodier, but the mint in the mousse is subtle and fresh. The detective had a streak of toothpaste dried on his shirt, she remembers, and imagines the glitter of wet blood on a dented copper bowl.  
   
"You want to offer your services."  
   
"Of course. I would see you returned to some semblance of your life ... before."  
   
She takes a deep breath and feels those shards of glass settle against her skin again. Hannibal's hands are long and pale, the skin and nails immaculate. In her dreams—while she sleeps and while she is awake—his nails are long and yellow, his blood slippery on her teeth and tongue. _Before_ still slides against itself in strange configurations, shadows where there should be memory.  
   
"I couldn't even if I wanted to."  
   
"And do you want to?"  
   
"Ah," she says, after another mouthful of the lamb,"that is the question."  
   
 

   
 _spring_  
   
Frost coats the windowpanes but the delicate tracery quickly dissolving in the sunlight that grows stronger every morning. Bedelia spends little time in the house now, but every week she returns to the house after a long day and lets herself into the front room. The boxes are packed away themselves now, and a glass bowl sits where copper once did.  
   
"You haven't entertained recently, have you?"  
   
Hannibal tilts his head, his eyes narrowing slightly. "You are not the first to ask me that this week."  
   
"How long has it been? Two years?"  
   
"Nearly." His lips purse briefly and a shadow moves behind his head. "Angling for an invitation?"  
   
There's no need for that, surely. The dinner parties he throws for those who play at continental sophistication—the last vestiges of the blue-blood set—they're not for her. She prefers the intimacy of only the pair of them at a table, the time and quiet in which to savor the meals he prepares. At his hands, she samples succulent flesh and flavors that burst on her tongue, overripe and overwhelming.  
   
Once she might have found it all distasteful, but her tastes have grown. Still, she does miss the elaborate theatricality of his preparations.  
   
"I've been working with the FBI," Hannibal says, as though he had forgotten until this moment. "Did I mention it?"  
   
It isn't precisely the last thing she would expect to hear him say, but it comes close. "You're moonlighting?"  
   
"In a sense. I was asked to give my opinion on another consultant, and things have ... progressed."  
   
"Progressed in what way?"  
   
"I think I can be of help to this man. Will."  
   
"Does he need your help, then?"  
   
"He will. Even if he does not know it yet himself. But he will."  
   
He stops there. Hannibal will hear no prompting to tell her more, and she wants to give none. His attraction is palpable—and familiar. He will indulge it as he sees fit. As he always has. Bedelia, in turn, will listen to him and offer what counsel she can, when he wants it. And in the meantime, she will watch, and wait, and push when she needs to.  
   
"You have a remarkable confidence in your utility," she says. It's nothing less than the truth, and he doesn't mind hearing it. His hands spread, fingers held apart, in a gesture of supplication.  
   
Her own fingernails have replaced his in the cracks, scraping, digging deep into the shell of fragile glass holding her together. Within, there is something foul, dark and hot, ready to break free, teeth at the ready.


End file.
